HOUSTON – Tweeting, status updates, the instant posting of personal photos to the World Wide Web. It's all become such a huge part of many people's lives and none of those platforms took a backseat to Hurricane Isaac.
As the storm took aim at the Gulf Coast, people took out their smartphones and video cameras and documented their experiences with the storm step by step, blow by blow and drop by drop. It's a much different world than when Hurricane Katrina struck seven years ago. There were a lot of comparisons between the two hurricanes before and during this storm, but this time around people were not only better prepared, but they had numerous ways to share their experience.
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There was the YouTube video of a woman on the beach in Gulfport, Miss.
"This wind is kickin' like crazy," she said as her husband tried to steady the camera in the wind.
A few seconds in, her baseball cap gets blown off her head, leaving her to chase it before it winds up in the crashing waves.
"About to blow us away. Hopefully we can anchor ourselves down a little bit," said one man in the passenger seat of a car. His video would wind up on YouTube as well.
The "Twitterverse" was just as busy, giving people the chance to express their thoughts in 140 characters or less.
S.D Combe tweeted, "Isaac shelters are filling up outside New Orleans."
User "babbwiz" seemed frustrated but offered respect for Mother Nature when she tweeted "I have power, a full battery on my phone, only a flooded street...but barely any signal on my phone? You win. #hurricaneisaac."
Then there were the photos that streamed in on sites like Instagram. They showed drenched trees tossed by the wind, structures damaged and destroyed and even man's best friend facing down the hurricane.